A Nigerian entrepreneur who co-founded two billion-dollar African startups and was a founding investor in a third is making another bold bet: that African software engineers will fill the rising global demand for AI talent.
Iyinoluwa Aboyeji has started Talent Nation to supply developers to multinationals, providing the human input that remains relevant to making usable AI products. The new venture mirrors Andela, a company he launched in 2014 and which — with the backing of investors like Mark Zuckerberg, Serena Williams, and former US Vice President Al Gore — trained a generation of software engineers in six African countries. The dizzying levels of capital being raised by AI companies in Silicon Valley, underscored by the buzz around Anthropic’s march to a potentially historic IPO, point to a market opportunity that could surpass his previous endeavors.
“We’ve got a goal of a million AI engineers over the next 10 years,” Aboyeji, who also co-founded Flutterwave and was one of the first checks into Moove, told Semafor in an interview. Most developers from his new company’s training programs will be African, though “I don’t know that we are going to constrain ourselves,” he said. Andela, which Aboyeji left in 2016, eventually moved beyond training only African software developers in 2021.
Talent Nation is taking off with seed money from Kenyan investor Enza Capital and London-headquartered fund LocalGlobe, Aboyeji said, but declined to say how much. The startup’s inaugural program, Learn2Earn, has received 63,000 applications, from which less than 3% were selected and are currently in training in multiple campuses. It does not charge fees for tuition.
“Developing talent at scale is an extraordinarily complex undertaking,” Kesiah Valkin, the company’s CEO and Talent Nation’s co-founder, said. “It is easy for us to say that Africa has enormous talent but what’s really hard is building the infrastructure to actually find that talent and develop them to globally competitive standards.”
